Classification of blogs and blogging communities

Classification of blogs
With the increasing of blogs today, there is a number of ways in classifying them accordingly. Blogs can be categorized by subject matter, device, media type and status of publishers.

Subject Matter
According to Technorati.com(2008), blogs can be classify into six different subject matters:

1. Entertainment
2. Business
3. Lifestyle
   
4. Politics
5. Sports
6. Technology

Device
Blogs can also be defined by the type of device used to create them. Moblog is a blog written throught a mobile device, such as mobile phone or PDA (Teh 2007).

Media

1. Vlog (Blog that contains video clip-Video Blog)-YouTube
2. Linklog (Comprise links and URLs)-Jaani's Linklog
   
3. Sketchlog (Ccontains a portfolio of sketches/drawings-Kristen's sketchblog
4. Tumblelogs (Blogs with shorter posts and mixed media types)
5. Photoblogs (Comprise photos)

Status of publisher
Blogs can also be categorized according to the status of the publishers, whether it is for personal-sharing personal information (Kennysia's blog), professional- sharing political, technology or education matters (Jeff Ooi's blog) or business & corporate purpose (Dainty Dresser).

Many blogs are combinations of styles, and this makes identifying and classifying them difficult. In my opinion, to classify them accordingly and accurately, not only we have to look into the subject matters, device, media and status of the publishers. Topic discussed in the blog, style, format and audience of the blogs have to take into consideration too. It distinguish what type of audience usually read what kind of blogs, the topic, style and format used in a blog determine what the publisher wants to deliver to the audience.

Blogging Communities

Blogging communities is formed by a group people that sharing similar interests and views work together to turn the interest into passion. These communities enable readers to access a specific blog of their interests and bring them into different subject area. These can be done through communication tools such as permalink, comments and tags.

An example of a community is the Global Voices community where more than 200 bloggers around the world work together to bring you translations and reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media (globalvoicesonline.org 2009). Members of the community support each other hence enhances the learning process.

Example of Global Voices Homepage:

Source:Google Image

Referencing

Globalvoicesonline.org 2009, About, viewed 12^th June 2009, http://globalvoicesonline.org/about/.

Technorati.com 2008, Blog directory 2008, viewed 13^th June 2008, http://technorati.com/blogs/directory.

Teh, PL 2007, An Insight of blogosphere over the Internet, School of Management and Information Technology, UCSI, viewed 10^th June 2009, http://www.ucsi.edu.my/jasa/3/papers/AC8.pdf.